The Tidbit, brought to you by Cureate, digests this region’s small business landscape through food and beverage entrepreneurship. Tune in for trending new Tidbits at the top of the show, and then live interviews with business owners throughout the DC & Baltimore Metro Areas. Each week show host Kim Bryden will intertwine socio-cultural context, personal narrative, and business advice at The Tidbit.

EPISODE 05: WHAT IS A CO-OP BUSINESS, AND HOW DO YOU START ONE?

A FEW QUOTES:

The retail landscape is changing. Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market. Kroger in talks with Alibaba (online marketplace, sometimes compared to Amazon but based in China)... If other retailers can’t compete on convenience or price point, how can one survive?

"TPSS Co-op is a member of National Cooperative Grocers, an organization which includes more than 100 co-ops around the country that work together to optimize resources, strengthen purchasing power, and offer more value to owners."

How do you stay connected in a world that wants you to constantly hide behind a screen? Maybe you should consider joining a co-op.

Three major economic concepts: LLCs, communism, and cooperative model.

Over a billion people in the world belong to some sort of cooperative, doing trillions of dollars in business, millions are employed by cooperatives.

The first modern cooperative [...] was a basic consumer-owned cooperative (like TPSS) and that became a model that was replicated into many different industries and forms — co-ops owned by consumers, by farmers, by depositors, by business members.